Sunday, July 22, 2012

Colorado native
Abdulrahman
al-Awlaki wasn’t in a movie theater when his life met a sudden, violent
end. He was enjoying a backyard barbeque with his cousin in southeastern Yemen
when the home was destroyed by a drone-delivered Hellfire missile.

Abdulrahman was
sixteen years old when he was murdered by the United States government. He had
run away from home in a desperate attempt to find his father, Anwar, a “radical
cleric” who was the well-publicized target of the Obama administration’s
assassination program.

Despite the
fact that Anwar al-Awlaki was never formally charged with a crime – let alone
convicted of one – he was assassinated on Obama’s orders two weeks before
the Regime slaughtered his son and eight other innocent people.

Seeking to
justify the murder of a child, the Obama administration circulated the story
that the 16-year-old was actually an adult “suspected” of being a “militant.”

That story was refined somewhat once it was proven that Abdulrahman was a
teenager. However, the administration has never dropped the pretense that the summary
execution of that innocent U.S. citizen was, in some sense, a strategic
success. Since the Regime killed him -- and, in its sovereign wisdom, the Regime never errs -- the young man simply couldn't be innocent.

Within a day of
the Movie Theater Massacre, the murderer of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki announced
that he would travel to Colorado to bless the traumatized city of Aurora with
his healing presence.

We’re invited
to believe that the routine state terrorism committed by Obama and the
government over which he presides is both sensible and rational.

Apparently there
is something noble and redemptive about commissioning a legion of
chair-moistening joystick jockeys who – enthroned in the climate-controlled safety
of well-guarded office buildings in Nevada and Virginia – dispatch robot
aircraft to annihilate innocent strangers in places like Yemen, Afghanistan,
and Pakistan.

When drone-fired missiles wipe out wedding parties and funerals;
when drone operators exploit the panic and chaos of an initial strike to stage
follow-up attacks targeting emergency personnel – these acts are consecrated by
the Dear Leader’s approval, and thus cannot be compared to the rampage
committed by a private individual responsible for killing a dozen people and
wounding scores of others in Aurora.

In order to
clarify this vital distinction, it’s useful to recall the comments of Dear
Leader Emeritus Bill Clinton from an interview published in the
December 2009 issue of Foreign Policy. Asked
to elucidate this important matter, Clinton helpfully defined terrorism as
"killing and robbery and coercion by people who do not have state authority…."(Emphasis
added.) By reverse-engineering this definition we learn that "killing and
robbery and coercion" carried out in
the name of "state authority" isn't terrorism; it's public policy.

In a typical address he
stated that the U.S. government’s role in invading and occupying Muslim
countries “does not justify the killing of one U.S. civilian in New York City
or Washington, D.C.,” just as the murder of thousands of civilians in New York
and Washington do not “justify the death of one civilian in Afghanistan.”

Awlaki believed
that all people -- including Muslims -- have the right to defend themselves
against aggressive violence, and was not diffident in expressing that view. By
presidential decree, the expression of those views was made a capital offense.
The sentence was imposed not by a court of law, but through the deliberations
of a secretive, anonymous, unaccountable panel. There was certainly a great
deal of “efficiency” in this arrangement – but not so much as a hint or whisper
of due process.

In
a March 5 address that was an exercise in unalloyed sophistry, Attorney
General Eric Holder told an audience at Northwestern University Law School that
“due process” doesn’t require “judicial process.” During congressional
testimony two days later, FBI Director Robert Mueller was asked about Eric
Holder’s position, and whether it applied to the execution of American citizens on presidential orders. He artlessly
ducked the question by objecting that he would “have to go back” and check if
that was addressed in administration policy. In the intervening months, Mueller
has not found the time to report what he has learned.

The rationale
for the existence of political government is the belief – as unsupported by
empirical evidence as it is impervious to it – that concentrating power in an
entity claiming a monopoly on aggressive violence will protect the innocent. The
massacre in Aurora, like every other incident in which an armed criminal preys
upon a confined audience of unarmed, innocent people, underscored the fact that
the police are, at best, useless in such situations.

The police
arrived while the rampage was in progress. Police
recordings captured the sound of gunfire and screaming while officers
waited outside the theater, setting up a “perimeter” and waiting for gas masks
to be distributed. The assailant ended the slaughter on his own terms; the police did nothing to stop or minimize the carnage. Their mission was successful, however, since none of them was injured.

As the Columbus Dispatch pointed out, if the
police hadn’t been on time, Thomas would still be alive. As Thomas’s cousin
points out, the Columbus Police Department is “trying to justify” the shooting,
“no apology or nothing, [just saying] `Oh, we’re just doing what we were
trained to do” – that is, to put “officer safety” ahead of every other
consideration.

Believing that
the alleged robber was stopped a nearby red light, the police barricaded that
section of the street – which could be considered a reasonable tactic.

However,
they dragged more than forty people from their vehicles, handcuffed them, and
held them for more than four hours – which was not.

Drivers and
passengers “were handcuffed, then were told what was going on and were asked
for permission to search the car,” recalled Officer Frank Fania. “They all
granted permission, and once nothing was found in their cars, they were
un-handcuffed.”

Why was it
supposedly necessary to handcuff people before asking permission? If the
detention was justified, why did the police bother to ask for permission?Fania insisted
that the mass arrests were necessary and justified because it was a “unique”
situation. Actually, this was done not to protect the public, but rather in the
interest of “officer safety.” This is the same reason
why the police force in Colorado Springs, roughly 70 miles south of
Aurora, are using military-grade SWAT gear to carry out routine patrol
functions.

If you’re
stopped for a traffic infraction in Colorado Springs, you’re likely to be
accosted by someone dressed almost exactly like the perpetrator of the Aurora
Movie Theater Massacre. That armed stranger
has official permission to kill you if in his self-serving judgment you pose a
threat to him – and no legally enforceable responsibility to protect you,
should a threat to your person or property materialize. And functionaries who
serve the same government consider themselves entitled to kill anyone – U.S.
citizens included – via remote control on the orders of the individual who has
urged the nation to join him in mourning the victims of non-government-licensed
murder in Aurora.

Abdulrahman al-Awlaki with a young relative.

Referring to
the Movie Theater Massacre, Obama read these potted, insincere phrases from his
Teleprompter:

“I’m sure many of you who are parents had the same reaction
I did when you first heard this news: what if it had been my daughters at the
theater, doing what young children enjoy doing every day? Michelle and I
will be fortunate enough to hug our girls a little tighter this weekend, as I’m
sure you will do with your children.”

There are limits to Obama’s gift of empathy. He appears
untroubled by the fact that because of his criminal actions, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki’s mother has been deprived of
both her son and her husband. He is living proof of the fact that the deadliest sociopaths aren’t the ones who dye their hair red and identify with comic
book nihilists.

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

“[T]he majority has at all times
a right to govern the minority, and to bind the latter to obedience to the will
of the former…. In a general sense the will of the majority of the people is
absolute and sovereign, limited only by its means and power to make its will
effectual.”

Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, III,
327, 330

"The scientific concept of
dictatorship means nothing else but this — Power without limit, resting
directly upon force, restrained by no laws, absolutely unrestrained by
rules."

Vladimir Lenin

A constitution
merely prolongs the pretense that a political government can be limited by laws
that it will
interpret. Eventually, every constitutional government will embrace Lenin's
ruling formula -- "Power without limit, resting directly on force.”

The
function of the judiciary is liturgical: It transmutes the restrictive language
of the constitution into a mandate for government action. This process is
called “state-building” – and the purpose of the judiciary, insists Professor Jack M. Balkin of
Yale Law School, is to “ratify significant revisions to the American social
contract.”

According
to Balkin, “the most important function of the federal courts is to
legitimate state building by the political branches.” It does this by supplying
the appropriate scholarly conjurations every time those in charge of the State
seek to enrich their powers at the expense of individual liberty.

In this
fashion, the relatively modest constitutional state of the early 19th
century – which, Balkin notes with palpable disapproval, “didn’t do very much
more than national defense and customs collection” – built itself into the
omnivorous monstrosity he calls the “National Surveillance State.” This is an
entity that claims the authority to slaughter, torture, and imprison anybody on
the planet for any reason. From Balkin’s perspective, the role of the courts is
not to protect the rights of the individual, but to issue the occasional theodicy
justifying the inscrutable ways of the divine State.

“Whenever the
federal government expands its capabilities, it changes the nature of the
social compact,” writes
Balkin in The Atlantic. “Sometimes
the changes are small, but sometimes, as in the New Deal or the civil rights
era, the changes are big. And when the changes are big, courts are called on to
legitimate the changes and ensure that they are consistent with our ancient
Constitution” – a procedure that frequently involves subjecting language to
treatment that even Dick Cheney would describe as torture.

In order for
this to work, candor must be scrupulously avoided, and the pretense of
constitutionalism must be preserved.

“Courts do not
simply rubber stamp what the political branches do,” Balkin asserts. “Rather,
they set new ground rules. The government may do this as long as it doesn’t do
that. Legitimation is Janus-faced: it establishes what government can do by
establishing what the government cannot do” – at least, for now, until those
running it decide that the time has come to do what was previously impermissible.

That’s what
happened in the Obamacare ruling, Balkin concludes: “The political branches
sought to build out the American state and change the terms of the American
social contract. The Court legitimated this result, but set new ground rules
for politics going forward.”

As he points
out, both branches of the Establishment party want to continue building the
Leviathan state, albeit in the service of different constituencies: “Most
Republican politicians don’t actually want to strip the federal government of
most of the powers to regulate, tax and spend that came with the New Deal. This
is because Republican politicians want to use those powers to promote
Republican policies….”

Thus it was
exquisitely appropriate that the Supreme Court’s ratification of “the most
important piece of social welfare legislation since the 1960s” came in a
majority opinion written by a Bush-appointed Republican conservative. After
all, we should expect adherents of the Party of Lincoln to be doing the works of Abraham.

In his book Our
Secret Constitution: How Lincoln Redefined American Democracy, George P.
Fletcher, a Marxist Columbia University School of Law professor,
describes how the mission of Abraham the Destroyer was not to preserve the
constitutional union, but rather to impose a new order – one created through aggression by the
central government against the states that created it, and the people from whom
it supposedly derived its powers.

“The
new order inherits an operating Congress, Executive, and Judiciary,” writes
Fletcher, and although federal institutions have been “recast in new functions,
the forms remained the same.” Behind a change in federal functions is a new
ruling ideology, in which the central government elite now acts on “the
consciousness of setting forth a new framework of government, a structure based
on values fundamentally different from those that went before.”

“The heart of the new consensus is that the federal government,
victorious in warfare, must continue its aggressive intervention in the lives
of its citizens,” writes Fletcher approvingly. The Founders' Constitution was sold
to the populace as an austere and proscriptive document that defined the few
and specific things the central government would be permitted to do.

This arrangement was changed through Lincoln's war of aggression,
according to Fletcher, since “the liberty that comes to the fore in the
intended postbellum constitutional order and under the Secret Constitution
requires the intervention of government. Liberty is born in the state's
assertion of responsibility to oversee and prevent relationships of oppression.”
(Emphasis added.)

That is to say that “liberty” is a
revocable and highly conditional gift of the State, and that “oppression”
exists anywhere there are limits placed on the exercise of federal power. One
is “free” only to the extent he supports, and is subject to, the benevolent
rule of the unfathomably noble beings who inhabit the Imperial Capital. Questioning
their edicts and actions on “constitutional” grounds is intolerably impudent –
nay, it is nothing less than blasphemy, since everything our masters do is
blessed with the “presumption of constitutionality.”

The case dealt with a federal statute banning the sale of a product
called “filled milk.” The measure, which was passed as a favor to the dairy
lobby, was devoid of constitutional authority – but the Supreme Court upheld it
in the interest of “state-building,” and in doing so it promulgated a new
doctrine of “presumed constitutionality.”

“The Court’s reasoning was that the statute should be presumed constitutional, and thus the
burden was on the defendant company to prove that Congress could have no
constitutional authority and no lawful basis for regulating the sale of the
product – a nearly impossible showing,” recalls Judge Napolitano. “By requiring
a presumption of constitutionality instead of a presumption of liberty, the
Court permitted Congress to transgress economic liberties for almost any reason
it wished.”

That presumption invests the federal government with something
akin to constitutional infallibility: Between 1937 and 1995, as Judge
Napolitano observes, the Supreme Court didn’t strike down a single piece of
federal legislation on constitutional grounds.

Many
people blessed with sound, sober, and subtle minds believe that all of this
represents a “perversion” of the original constitution. Others, such as the ever-perspicacious Butler Shaffer, insist that the federal government has "never
deviated" from the Constitution: The document was written in a way that encouraged government expansion and
provided the means to accomplish it while sustaining the necessary illusion
that its powers were effectively limited by law and its administrators were in
some sense accountable to the people they rule.

Any
governmental charter permitting seizure of property through
"eminent domain" and the suspension of habeas corpus (the irreducible
due process guarantee) for any
reason is latently totalitarian at best; those provisions offer a glimpse of
the “secret constitution” described by Fletcher, in which federal power is
limited only by the ingenuity and brazenness of those who wield it.

Many conservatives
reacted to Judge Roberts’ Obamacare ruling by giving voice to the same pious outrage
they express every time the Supreme Court redefines the “social contract.” A
healthier reaction would be to ask: Why should any individual be governed by a “contract”
that he never signed, and that the other party can unilaterally revise at its
pleasure?